Thursday, April 28, 2011

The Illusion

[Thursday, February 10, 2011]

It is the year 2100. The world is in flux. Large numbers of people are being redistributed, both by choice and by the manipulation of the vast social engineering apparatus, or, as those who know call it – The Illusion. There are those who live outside the illusion and those who live inside. Cultures are designed. Long ago, cultures were fermented over time. Now, time does not exist, at least in that sense.

In the illusion things don’t progress in a simple trajectory, they don’t ebb and flow like the tides. Instead, this life is a repetition of the same thing over and over. The façade changes, tastes change, neighborhoods and relationships change, but they do so only to uphold the illusion of the passing of time. Beyond the façade, the system remains in a state of static equilibrium. No revolutions, no triumph. No hindsight, no dreams. People experience conflict, but only that which is designed as such. True conflict does not exist. The fluctuation of reality, of Activity versus Dormancy, Aggression versus Cooperation, Love versus Hate, and Right versus Wrong, as they push and pull on the path of time, have been reduced to an unwavering horizontal line. All life continues unchanged by the unfolding of events.

But this is not life. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows that we must see night and day in order to maintain mental stability. Everyone knows that we must slumber and awaken to maintain physical cohesion. Just as this is known, so it is for the vicissitudes of life. For this reason, it is engineered into the daily ongoings of the life of the submitting population.

In a sense, they choose to live this way. They understand the necessity for cyclical change and submit to the illusions that have been so thoughtfully articulated for their well-being. It is not blissful paradise, though some choose a more seductive version of the illusion. It is not base destitution, though some are cunningly diverted into the upper realms of poverty. For the most part, it is life as usual. Unthinkable crime and horror have been minimized, though with it, unforeseeable epiphanies and ecstasy. That is not to say that these do not exist, just that they are managed, controlled. Ultimately, they, none of them, ever happen. Nothing happens. Plants grow, wind blows, and insects crawl in crooked lines, but all of this has been arranged. This has all been done for the betterment of humankind, for the Greater Good.

Now, there are some who deny the illusion. That is not to say that they deny one illusion for another, as most do – that is, in itself, a false choice. But no, these others, they live, painfully, in the Constant Now. This Now does not supply spirit-nourishing change. Love is not made stronger by the vanquishing of hate. Silence does not exist, for there is no unrest. These others, they choose this life, this non-life, again and again, moment after moment, in a battle of self preservation vs. self destruction.

Life outside the illusion is not long. Those who walk away face hardships for which the coping mechanisms required have been bred out of them for generations. Those who turn their backs also lose their connectivity to the anthroposphere, the collective will to live that people propagate amongst themselves and which is the fuel that propels human life through the barrier of time and into the future.

These are those who orbit the anthroposphere, who surround it in a web of purpose supported only by their own belief in an underlying force – a threat. They claim to feel its danger, to see its light coming on the horizon. They are dismissed. “They feel too much”, it is said. They are known to travel throughout space in the way memories slide through our minds. The population at large is told to stay away from them, both physically and mentally, for they creep. They create thought, but not full thoughts as we are used to – fragmented thoughts, half-thoughts that require another human like themselves to come together into a fully formed idea, but at the risk of remaining forever unfinished and unanswered. Their creeping thoughts represent a bubble rising to the surface, bursting and rippling its wake outwards to crash on the shores of the collective consciousness. They are disruptive.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about them at this time. They disrupt our way of life and their numbers grow with the passing of the days, more creeping, feeling, thinking people. They leave us because they are afraid, and they make us afraid.

About Me

First things first, that's not a picture of me, although it could be any one of us. It's a painting by Alex Grey.
Next, the blog Limbic Signal is an extension of my book Hidden Scents, and the blog Network Address is a personal archive that I like to keep online for easy access.
Last, I'm a thirty-something male from Suburbia, New Jersey, a high school visual arts instructor, independent researcher, and writer.
Hidden Scents The Language of Smell in the Age of Approximation is my first attempt at authoring a work of non-fiction, and serves as a response to the dearth of information on the topic of Smell.